Literature

marxists.org is a pretty old-fashioned website full of mostly older marxist literature that’s no longer copyrighted. It’s not the easiest place to navigate, but they have hundreds of theorists, statesmen, activists, and historians in their list of authors with everything from entire books, speeches, analyses of events, and even some fiction/poetry. It’s a great source for a lot of the basic literature that marxists will often cite (Marx, Hegel, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc) as well as historical documents that are mostly only going to be useful if you’re working with a specific argument or counterargument.

libcom.org has pdfs of a lot more post-modern and post-marxist literature. These sorts of texts are great for analyzing how present-day capitalism makes our lives worse, but many of these authors also had explicit anti-soviet sentiments so it’s something to consider when weighing their points. They can have amazing analyses of social problems but tend to come up short when thinking of solutions to said problems.

Commonly Cited Youtubers:

• Badempanada (Shitposter with decent takes, does some video essays based in historical materialism)
• Hakim (Makes short topical videos, has some perspective living through the Iraq War as an Iraqi)
• Luna Oi! (Mostly talks about Vietnam and her own perspective living in an AES country. Is translating a Vietnamese textbook on Dialectical Materialism to English)
• Marxist Paul (Makes short intro to communism videos, but he can be a little traditionalist)
• NonCompete (Luna Oi’s husband and AnarchoCommunist. Mainly speaks out against sectarianism)
• Plastic Pills (Philosophy nerd, his video on Chile is awesome)
• Prolekult (Does short and long form essays, their most recent video on fascism is pretty good)
• Radical Reviewer (Does summaries of marxist literature)
• Second Thought (Makes very short/digestible intro-to-communism videos)
• Yugopnik (Tends to make essays on specific topics with an Eastern European perspective)

Additionally:

• Hakim, Second Thought, and Yugopnik have a podcast called The Deprogram which is a fun little radio show for newbies.
• Revolutionary Left Radio makes so much content, hours and hours of interviews and longform essays. It’s a lot more dry than most of the content listed above, but the hosts care about being honest in their presentation and try to make every episode easy to digest no matter if you’re new or have been involved for a long time.

Reactionaries to avoid:

• Caleb Maupin (Borderline White Nationalist)
• David Pakman (Literally just a liberal)
• Destiny (Doesn’t read, just makes stuff up)
• Infrared (Bases his entire ideology in his low self-esteem)
• Jimmy Dore (Conspiracy Theorist)
• Vaush (Evidence points to him likely being an opportunistic pedophile)

Religion is accepted, but not inside the State, the State has to be secular, only abiding to the socialist principles.

Books? Read Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I hear Mao is the easiest to read, while Marx is the hardest. Lenin is a must. And Parenti, he is perhaps the easiest introduction read his Blackshirts and Reds and other works.

Ukraine is a humanitarian catastrophy cooked up by the West. Mainly them being overconfident and overzealous, ignoring big power politics as if Russia were an irrelevant country such as Ghana. Ukraine ate all their Kool aid up and ended up fucked from both sides, invaded by Russia while having to pay for Western weapons.

AES = Actually Existing Socialism. Actually here referring to the fact that they do abide rules of reality and don’t need to be picture-perfect from theory.

1. War in Ukraine - this is hot topic now. Main party responsible for this is the USA and their NATO puppets. Ukraine has been their victims of 30 years of comprador government working against their country interests. Second one is Ukraine themselves. They had a (US sponsored) neonazi coup in 2014 and immediately started to opress russian minority and also intensified capitalist looting of economy, especially in the eastern part. When their victims organized they started a murderous war with numerous war crimes that lasted since 2014 with thousands of innocent murdered by Ukrainian army and neonazi groups like Azov (those are now officially part of the military btw.). Russia and even EU mediated the conflict in Minsk Accords, and the terms weren’t even outrageous by any means but Ukraine refused to comply. To avoid war they just had to stop murdering people in Donbass, but they didn’t. Right now, war in Ukraine is probably the most propagandized event in the history of media, and you shouldn’t trust anything about it from the western media, since they censored everything not fitting the narration - to the point even russian cats were banned from expos just for being Russian. Yes, even cats, not even Goebbels went this far.

2. Books. I would start from Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. Rest of his books are also good, he’s great popularisator. Also this essay: https://www.cym.ie/2020/04/01/left-anti-communism-the-unkindest-cut-by-michael-parenti/

Then go to classics: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch01.htm

AES: Actually Existing Socialism: countries which the idealist refuse to be socialist and they are: USSR, Cuba, PRC, DPRK etc.

Religion: basically this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm

PS: don’t bother with youtube nobodies. They are often reactionary and serve mostly as distractors.

“Sorry, but after reading the reasons on why Russia is right in this conflict. I can’t agree with it, i’m sorry but war isn’t the way”

lmao, first you must get rid of your liberalism. this centrist bullshit will get you nowhere.

Well, this is a time where Dialectics (you can read about it concisely in Anarchism or Socialism by Stalin, he describes it as plainly and as directly as anyone could try) come into play. We can both support and refute a stance since we ourselves are not making active decisions on the matter. We can support Russia to the extent that they are anti-west imperialism, support them to the extent that they are defending Russian-ethnic Ukrainians in Donbass, and to the extent that they are fighting against Nazis. We support them to the extent that they have an active, growing and legal communist party and to the extent that the US has caused or helped to further a lot of these issues that Russia is opposed to(others here have correctly brought up the Euromaidan) and that Zelensky is corrupt af. We can repudiate Russia for themselves having corruption, for attacking civilians and the like. We can also repudiate Ukraine for arming non-uniformed civilians and for driving troops in Red Cross vehicles as well as not warning nearby areas of airstrikes, all of these are war crimes as dictated by the Geneva Convention and this has been happening since the start of the whole invasion. When Russia does something wrong, we don’t have to close our eyes, but we can look closer and usually find a problem that caused it. The invasion looks unprompted…until you learn about Donbass being bombed and the Alley of Angels(Аллея Ангелов). Russia looks like they are liars spreading false info of lab leaks… until you look closer and see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK196149/ and the same scientist mentioned is also hosting this presentation https://slideplayer.com/slide/8340108/ this is when you notice that while Russia does their propaganda as does every other nation, that it is not always lies and that the US themselves will put out info and lie about that public info years later hoping desperately that you will forget and that you will fly a Ukrainian flag. Using dialectics, we can come to the conclusion that while we don’t support Russia fully, we have to support them much more than we oppose them because of the reactionary forces that the opposition to Russia represents. We can understand their faults, as long as we recognize the opposition that creates many of those faults through their own action, like the Ukrainian nazi battalions fighting Donetsk and Luhansk, the Ukrainian civilians hurt is sad, but it was not unprompted and if Zelenskyy followed Geneva conventions from the start of this, he’d be more sympathetic(despite all the awful corruption and being content with Nazi battalions). Sorry for the long comment, but that’s why we support Russia to a decent extent

In the Ukraine War we support Russia. This is for several reasons:

1- It wasnt Russia that started this war deliberately, it was the US, 8 years ago. In 2014, the US staged a coup d’etat in Ukraine to overthrow the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych and install a puppet government that would do their bidding. This coup was led by literal neonazis like Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the neonazi party Svoboda and who was standing right next to US senator John McCain as he was giving a speech in support of the Maidan protests in Kiev. This ukrainian nazi movement dates back to WW2 when Stepan Bandera, a ukrainian nazi, fought with the nazis against the USSR in the war and participated in the Holocaust killing jews, poles and russians. On his orders, up to 200k people were killed.

Bandera is worshipped by these neonazis and he is in fact officially considered National Hero of Ukraine by the ukrainian government. This new nazi government started pushing an aggressive antirussian agenda on US orders, including inside the country. This included attacking the ukrainian russian minority which represents 30% of the population and are a majority in East Ukraine (Donbass) and Crimea. This included banning the russian language in schools and media and banning the political parties that represented them. When this happened they protested and were brutally repressed, like in the Odessa massacre where 50 communist and russian protesters were burned to death with molotov cocktails by state supported neonazi gangs.

So the russians took up arms and defended themselves, also asking Russia for support, which they got. Russian troops (which were already there since Russia had always had a military base in Crimea at Sevastopol) protected the protesters in Crimea from the nazi gangs and allowed them to hold a referendum on joining Russia or staying in Ukraine, in which people overwhelmingly voted to join Russia. In Donbass, protesters seized weapons and declared independence, proclaiming the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. In response, the nazi government created literal neonazi battalions (Azov Battalion, Right Sector, Aidar, C14), armed them and sent them to Donbass where they have been bombing and genociding the russians ever since. Indiscriminate cruelty against civilians became the norm and was a strategy openly used by Ukraine. In the words of then ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko “Our children will go to school, theirs will stay hidden in the basement all day! Thats how we will win this war!”.

Unlike the western narrative, Russia was initially very careful, and refused to recognize the new republics. Russia negotiated a ceasefire and a peace agreement in Minsk, but Ukraine refused to implement it to this day. It was only after 7 years of genocide and after Ukraine was preparing to launch a full scale invasion of Donbass that Russia launched its special military operation and entered the war.

2- The US is doing this to encircle and eventually coup Russia itself to take its natural resources under the control of american corporations. This began in the 90s with the expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia. Vladimir Putin isnt a communist nor antiamerican, all he ever wanted was good relations with the west. But the west has always refused this because they want Russia to be under their boot. Russia allowed NATO expansion for decades and chose to be diplomatic, but now its reached a limit. Now Ukraine and Georgia also want to join (after having their governments couped and a puppet installed), which is unacceptable. The US didnt allow Cuba to have soviet nuclear missiles, so why should Russia allow Ukraine? All Russia asked was “Ukraine dont join NATO and stop the genocide in Donbass”, but they refused. All they are doing is defending themselves. As communists, we can never support the US, the main imperialist power, to expand its influence and control, so we must support Russia.

3- Russia is a key ally of the communists. Sure, Vladimir Putin isnt a communist nor does he like us. But Russia is a key ally of the communist countries like China and Cuba. The current enemy of communists is the west (US and EU), and without Russia we cant defeat it, so we must support it. Also Russia is much closer to communism than any western country or Ukraine. In Russia communism is insanely popular and communist leaders like Lenin and Stalin are widely supported. The main opposition party in Russia is the Communist Party, whose popularity grows election after election. Communism is so strong in Russia that even Putin is forced to pay some lip service to it by honoring Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union, otherwise his popularity would plummet and he would lose the elections to the Communist Party. Youll never hear Putin saying “the Soviet Union was totalitarian” or some other lie like you do in the west. Meanwhile in Ukraine, after the coup communism was banned and the members of the Communist Party of Ukraine (which was the 4th most voted party before the coup) imprisoned or killed. Supporting Ukraine as a communist is pure nonsense.

4- Russia winning this war severely weakens the west. You already see it, because of the sanctions on Russia more and more countries are getting closer to China and away from the US. Countries like India, the Solomon Islands, Bolivia, Nepal, Iraq and more are refusing to condemn and sanction Russia. This war is speeding up the inevitable end of the US empire. This is good for communism.

Let me know if you have any questions on any of this, ill be happy to answer! Also to see clear evidence of the 2014 “revolution” being a US backed coup see the documentary Ukraine on Fire by Oliver Stone: https://youtu.be/LHH10jIRJmQ

An absolutely critical step is to fully understand dialectical materialism!

Here’s a good introduction / crash course to socialism / communism .

I’d recommend asking other 101 type questions, as specific ones in !communism101@lemmygrad.ml.

Just wanted to say hello!!! The one thing I can firmly answer is that AES means All Existing Socialism, meaning places like Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, and China.

I’m communist and I don’t support Russia’s invasion. In fact, anyone who calls themselves communist should not support it too. Putin is a pos. War is hell, the labor class always pay the price of war.

Having said that, I won’t defend Ukraine too. The origins of the conflict dates back to Euro Maidan events and it’s clearly tha nazis have infiltrated the government and hold power there.

As a communist it’s your duty to see the world through the lens of historical materialism, which implies here not buying mainstream media romanticized version of this war. But go from this to be supportive of Russia is a jump no communist should take.

As for the rest, a good starting point is to read the Communist Manifesto.

Religion is a tool that is always used to control people and blur their class consciousness. This do not mean it must be banned in a comunist society. For instance, Evo (Bolivia) was a socialist and spoke to the masses using a lot of religious anecdotes, because in Christianity there’s this “socialist” side of Christ that allows such narratives.

I’ll give a simple answer on two of these.

What side do you guys stand against the war in Ukraine?

In general, it’s better to stand against the imperialist forces of our own countries, than outright condemn the imperialism of our country’s enemies. Is Russia local-imperialist? yes. Are they justified in going to war? absolutely. It doesn’t matter if you stand with Russia or not, as long as you’re standing against NATO and Ukraine’s government.

Is religion accepted in a communist nation?

We won’t accept anti-religious bigotry on Lemmygrad. Regardless of how you, as an individual, feel about religion. Our religious comrades are still valid members of our shared community. It’s my opinion that China’s religious policy is the best one I’m familiar with, they’ve legitimized all of the popular and culturally important religions within China, while not tying them into the state.

[edit] I hope that y’all didn’t miss that I said simple. These answers are, to put it directly, only intended to help our comrade and any comrades who might happen across this come to understand and accept our viewpoints on these things. I don’t know how much the comrade who made this post knows, I don’t know how ‘down to clown’ with Marxist rhetoric they are, so it’s best to use language and arguments they should be able to understand, than give them a theory lecture. This comment section is full of the kind of toxicity I left Reddit over.

Personally, if I were introducing someone open to the concept about the core ideology, the last thing I would bring up is the war in Ukraine. Hopefully you can spend some time focusing on some of the other info in this thread

Socialists always stand for revolutionary defeatism. You should always want your country to lose in it’s imperial pursuits. Getting into the weeds is a distraction and it’s fueled by capitalist propaganda. As a United States subject I am always on the side of the United States defeat.

First, I am equally under the thumb of the United States Bourgeoisie. For me to ever be personally free they must be defeated.

Second, I know the character of the United States. I’m not a child. I’ve seen the history of United States foreign involvement, and without knowing any facts can assume that whatever the United States is currently doing in Ukraine is aligned with all of it’s other foreign adventures. How many times should you allow yourself to be fooled?

Capitalism and Imperialism are tied hand in glove. After Capitalism develops as far as it can within it’s own borders the national bourgeoisie seek to apply the principles of capitalism to other nations. This is imperialism.

This is what the United States was doing in Ukraine and the Russian response was predicted by just about everyone of importance. Oliver Stone is a great film maker. He foresaw and documents this crisis well before it was on anyone’s minds. If you are interested in the conflict I highly recommend you watching Ukraine on Fire. https://rumble.com/vwxxi8-ukraine-on-fire.html

As far as religion is concerned, there have been some historical conflicts between religion and notable revolutions. Most importantly, the French Revolution, which was of course not socialist. The Religious institutions supported the Monarchy. The Divine right to rule comes out of support from the Church. The Church was also a cooperative element in the exploitation and oppression of peasants and serfs. It wasn’t necessarily religion as a philosophy that the French Revolution had a problem with. It was the material institutions which had been harming them and were at that moment fighting against them. The same was true for the Russian Revolution. Remember that Russia at the time of the revolution was a feudal nation ruled by the Czars as well as the Orthodox Church.

To call Communism anti religious would be similar to calling Modernity itself anti religious. Both revolutions had to fight violently against the Church. Protestantism had to fight similarly during the Protestant Reformations. The Church during these times were political institutions with a lot of power. You’re already aware of many examples of the Church demonstrating it’s power. If the Church and State are joined, it’s impossible to wage a revolution against one and not the other. So that is the historical background to your question on religion.